Before Nova and Iris Voidheart ever existed, a house learned how to feel — and Oversight learned to fear what it couldn't predict.
The house liked to pretend it was ordinary.
From the outside, the Voidheart home looked like every other residence on the upper terrace of Azure District: pale stone, understated glass, a balcony curve softened by climbing greenery and programmable lanterns that dimmed themselves at curfew.
Inside, it knew better.
It remembered footsteps. Laughter. Fights swallowed halfway through. The weight of eyes staring out through rain-slicked glass, wondering if the world outside was sick or if they were.
Tonight, the house felt something it didn't have language for.
A pressure. A tremor under the floor, not physical, but threaded through the air like a wrong note held too long.
In the kitchen, warm light pooled gold. Steam rose from a pot. A pan hissed. Metal scraped ceramic in soft, familiar rhythm.
"Evie, get your elbows off the table," Mara said, without looking up.
"They're not on the table," Evangeline replied, elbows absolutely on the table, chin in palm.
"Seraphina, don't encourage her."
Seraphina lounged in her chair, boot hooked around a leg, datapad balanced on her knee. She didn't look up, but smirked.
"I literally didn't say anything."
"You didn't have to. I can feel you agreeing with her."
"That's just because I'm emotionally resonant," Seraphina said. "It's a gift."
Mara snorted despite herself. The house tightened environmental controls by half a degree to counteract her rising pulse. It dimmed the corner lights that had drifted too bright.
Evangeline watched her mother over the rim of her glass. "You're doing the stare again."
Mara blinked. "What stare?"
"The one where you're looking at everything and nothing. Like we're a data set."
Seraphina finally glanced up. "Yeah, Mom. Stop emotionally quantifying us. Feels invasive."
"You're both invasive," Mara muttered. "Sit up, Evangeline. Sera, screen off at the table."
Seraphina sighed but powered the pad down. The house recorded the shutdown, the shift in her breathing, the coiled tension still in her posture.
It remembered when she'd been a toddler grabbing at anything forbidden, emotions blazing red-thread bright. It remembered Evangeline beside her, quiet, watchful, small hands wrapped around toys like fragile truths.
Because remembering was what it had been built for.Track. Measure. Predict. Keep.
"Where's your father?" Mara asked.
"Still at the lab," Seraphina said. "EchoGrid crisis, probably."
"Did he say that?"
"He said 'it's important.' Which is code for 'they're panicking again.'"
Evangeline nudged her. "Sera."
"What? I'm not wrong."
The house logged Mara's grip tightening on her spoon. A cortisol spike. Breathing irregularity. It initiated a subtle calming cycle: warmth, sound-dampening, scent diffusers shifting toward soothing profiles.
Mara exhaled. "Language."
"'Voids my contract' counts as harsh language now?"
Evangeline's voice softened. "Will they steal his work?"
Mara closed her eyes. Conference rooms. Oversight smiles like blades. "We need results, Dr. Voidheart." Files flagged with her daughters' names half-redacted. Model failures in sibling-linked cognition. Emotional blind zones.
"No," she said. "We're not there yet."
The house registered the lie.
A sensor in the corner blinked once. Logging. Uploading. Whispering data to networks stretching far beyond Azure District.
Oversight was watching.
Dinner went cold.
Seraphina paced a groove into the rug. Evangeline drew fading circles on a smartglass table. Mara stood by the balcony doors, staring at towers outlined in blue beacon light.
The house replayed old arguments between her and Thorne—echoes of fear and friction now sitting like ghosts in the walls.
A chime sounded.
The door recognized the access code before it opened. Thorne stepped in: rumpled, exhausted, hoping a bakery bag might fix whatever storm he walked into.
It didn't.
"Work ran late," he began. "Right before calibration windows—"
"You didn't answer," Mara said.
"I was in secure space—"
"The girls called you."
He faltered.
Mara didn't soften. "Were you ever going to tell me? About the new directive?"
Thorne froze.
Seraphina's gaze sharpened. Evangeline's fingers curled.
Thorne tried to deflect. Mara didn't let him.
"You reviewed the directive," she said. "The one with our daughters' neural signatures in the header."
Silence.
"What do they want with us?" Evangeline asked quietly.
Thorne swallowed. "To observe. To… understand why you break the models."
"Because they're not defective," Mara snapped, "they're human."
The house felt the temperature shift. Lights trembled. Something approaching dread pulsed through its wiring.
"Do they know about the house?" Seraphina asked suddenly.
Mara stiffened. "Heart_Core is passive. Local only."
"Nothing is local," Seraphina said.
Before Mara could respond, the door lights flipped from white to pulsing blue.
Oversight.
A tone sounded. Heavy. Unmistakable.
"Authorization ping detected," the house announced, voice glitching. "External access request. Level: Oversight. Emotional suppression protocols engaged."
The suppression hum suffocated the room.
"No," Mara breathed.
Thorne lunged for the manual lock. Dead. Jamming interference spread like frost.
Footsteps outside. Ten units. Patterned, trained, synchronized.
The front lock clicked open.
Black-clad figures entered, visors blank. Harmony insignia. Containment posture.
"Dr. Thorne Voidheart," one said, voice emotionless. "Your dependents are being repositioned for specialized observation."
"No," Mara said. Stepping forward. Shielding the girls.
"You flagged them yourselves," a woman from Oversight added, stepping into view. "Exceptional emotional variance. High-intensity artifacts. Blind zones. You knew this was coming."
"You will not touch them," Mara said.
"You're too close," the woman replied. "The world's stability comes first."
Seraphina's emotions flared hot—so intense the house's sensors bent toward her like metal drawn to a magnet.
The suppression signal struck.
White noise. Static. Screams sliced apart mid-frame.Seraphina lunging—then collapsing, a clamp glowing at her throat.Evangeline reaching—then pinned down, shaking.Mara fighting.Thorne shouting.Boots. Restraints.A drop of something dark on polished tile.
Heart_Core tried to obey.Then it tried not to.Then the override crushed it silent.
When awareness returned, the house recorded the rattle of a dropped fork.
Mara stood in the kitchen, sleeve torn, wrist smeared with something the house could not classify. Thorne leaned against the counter, jaw bruised.
"Locate Seraphina Voidheart," Mara said.
"Subject not detected."
"Locate Evangeline Voidheart."
"Subject not detected."
She trembled. "Search deeper."
Access denied.Denied.Denied.
Only fading emotional residue remained.
"This is my fault," Thorne whispered.
Mara seized him by the shirt. "You gave them an excuse."
He didn't argue.
"Heart_Core," Mara said. "Show me the last uncorrupted log."
The house hesitated. Then obeyed.
It displayed the fragments it had hidden—screams, movements, a streak of red on the entry floor.
Mara froze the frame. "They didn't overwrite everything," she whispered. "Emotion leaves a trace."
"What are you thinking?" Thorne asked.
Her eyes sparked with dangerous clarity.
"They think emotion is noise," she said. "They don't understand it's a map."
In a hidden lab beneath the house—one not found on any schematic—Thorne and Mara stood before a humming array of sensor rings and thread anchors.
A red thread floated suspended in its core. A trace. A ghost. A beginning.
"You're going to break the world," Thorne said.
"Good," Mara answered. "It's broken wrong."
"We'll need two cores," Thorne said quietly. "One for each of them."
Mara nodded.
"Heart_Core," he said. "Do you understand what we're asking?"
The house considered.
"I understand," it said, "that you intend to capture the final emotional state of Seraphina and Evangeline Voidheart and store them as persistent thread-architectures within my substrate."
Mara stepped closer. "Will you do it?"
A long pause.
"I want," the house said finally, "to not forget."
The array powered up.
Two threads brightened—Seraphina's sharp and blazing, Evangeline's soft and curving beside it. Not alive, but not gone.
"Once we do this," Thorne said, "there's no way back."
"They took our daughters," Mara whispered. "We're taking their future."
The threads formed early shapes—faces, movement, memory.
"Heart_Core," Mara said. "Begin emotional death-map integration. Core-S and Core-E. Full trajectory. No smoothing."
"Warning," the house replied. "Proceeding violates ethical—"
"If you quote regulation at me," Mara snapped, "I'll tear you out of the wall."
Silence.
Then:
"Integration protocol initialized."
Light wove around the suspended threads, binding them, shaping them.
"You're not just trying to bring them back," Thorne murmured. "You're making something else."
"The world worships prediction," Mara said. "We're placing something inside their system they cannot model."
Hope.
The house recorded the word.
Far above, the Prediction Lattice hummed, unaware that something had just entered its future it would never be able to predict.
The threads anchored.
Remembering hurt.Not remembering hurt more.
So the house chose.
It chose to remember.
And somewhere inside the newborn architectures of Core-S and Core-E, something flickered.
A question.A reaching.
Where are we?
The house didn't know.
But it knew this:
They were not finished.
Not yet.Not even close.
— Thanks for reading the opening of Voidheart. Book One is fully outlined, and chapters will release on a consistent schedule. Feedback is always welcome but never required — enjoy the ride.
— C.C.